At Supercomputing 2023, observers said that the Top500 list of the world’s fastest computers needs a shakeup.

That is because submissions of benchmarks are dropping, and cloud providers are not submitting systems because of the time and cost required for benchmarking. Moreover, the speed gap is widening, with horsepower concentrated only in the hands of a few systems.

The list also has a China problem, and Top500 officials mentioned the lack of visibility of systems in the country makes the list incomplete. Top500 has experts tracking China’s developments, but the submissions are not forthcoming.

Instead, the Chinese released their own Top 100 list of the world’s fastest computers, which seems more like an illusory exercise than a serious effort to measure computing speed. China has exaflop computers shrouded in secrecy, and none are listed.

The system itself listed very few official agencies, with the top system listed as being from a “server provider.” The system measured 487 petaflops based on the LINPACK benchmarking. Many of the Top 100 systems were provided by Inspur and Shenteng.

The news was first reported by Tom’s Hardware. But the list cannot be taken seriously because it isn’t honest.

The Chinese submitted an entry for the Gordon Bell awards for a supercomputer that could max out at 1.5 exaflops. But China has been cutting down its submissions to the Top500.

China still has two supercomputers in the top 20 fastest systems of the Top500, including the 93-petaflop Sunway TaihuLight and the 61-petaflop Tianhe-2A.

China was the second largest participant, with 104 systems, second only to the U.S., which had 161 systems. That is a decline from the June list, in which China had 134 systems. Only one new system from China was added to the November Top500 list.

China has put an iron curtain around its high-performance computing infrastructure since the U.S. put barriers on technology trade. The political and economic tensions between the U.S. and China may have disconnected China’s enthusiasm around the US-based Top500 list.

The U.S. wants to choke China’s progress in artificial intelligence by placing trade restrictions on the fastest AI chips from companies such as AMD, Intel, and Nvidia.

The Chinese are trying to build a chip infrastructure around RISC-V processors, which are not ready for primetime. One Chinese company, Sophgo, was promoting its RISC-V high-performance chips on the Supercomputing 2023 floor but also complained about the architecture’s capabilities and limited access to manufacturing capabilities.

Coincidentally, SC 2023 happened when Chinese President Xi Jinping visited U.S. President Joe Biden in San Francisco to smooth over the tensions.